The Knights of the Forest and the Expulsion of the Ho-Chunk, 1863

In the winter of 1862 to 1863, a group of men in Mankato, Minnesota, met in secret and bound themselves by oath to a single political goal. Their ritual pledged them to “banish forever from our beautiful state every Indian who now desecrates our soil.”¹ They called themselves the Knights of the Forest. Within months, the Ho-Chunk people living on a reservation about ten miles south of town had been forced onto steamboats and sent to Dakota Territory, and Mankato fired cannons to celebrate.¹²

How much of that outcome the Knights caused is a harder question than their later admirers allowed. The society left very few records, and much of what was written about it came from members who wanted credit. This article separates what the documents show from what was claimed afterward.

A war, an execution, and a demand for exile

The society grew out of the US-Dakota War of 1862. Decades of treaties had confined the Dakota to a strip along the Minnesota River; by the summer of 1862, with annuity payments late and traders refusing credit, many Dakota families were starving. In August a faction of Dakota men went to war. Fewer than 1,000 of a population of more than 7,000 took part, and many Dakota protected settlers. More than 600 settlers were killed in six weeks of fighting, and the number of Dakota dead was never recorded.³

The aftermath fell on the whole Dakota nation. The federal government annulled its treaties with the Dakota, hanged thirty-eight Dakota men at Mankato, and held about 1,600 Dakota non-combatants in a camp at Fort Snelling through the winter.³ In September 1862 Governor Alexander Ramsey had told the legislature that “The Sioux Indians of Minnesota,” as he put it, “must be exterminated or driven forever beyond the borders of the State.”⁴ The historian William Watts Folwell, surveying the newspapers of the time, found that they echoed him and widened the demand “to include every Indian of every tribe in the state.”⁴ In 1863 the Minnesota House adopted memorials asking for the removal of all tribes, though the Senate rejected them.⁴

This was the climate in which the Knights organized. The two county histories that first described them agree on the aim. Thomas Hughes, writing about 1909, said the society was founded around January 1, 1863, in a law office in Mankato, to have “both Sioux and Winnebago Indians removed from Minnesota,” with sublodges at Garden City and Meridan.² Folwell repeated the date and purpose in 1924, citing Hughes.⁴ MNopedia, the Minnesota Historical Society’s encyclopedia, dates the founding to early 1863, likely January.⁵

The Ho-Chunk at Blue Earth

By early 1863 it was widely presumed that the Dakota would be banished,⁴ and their removal was handled by a separate federal act: on March 3, 1863, Congress provided for the removal of the Sisseton, Wahpeton, Mdewakanton, and Wahpekute bands and directed the President to set apart unoccupied land for them outside the limits of any state.⁶ The people the Mankato society could most directly pressure lived closer to home.

The Ho-Chunk, then called Winnebago by Americans, had already been removed several times, from homelands in Wisconsin and from Illinois and Iowa,¹ and then from a reservation at Long Prairie in central Minnesota. By a treaty of 1855 they exchanged the Long Prairie land for about 200,000 acres along the Blue Earth River, land better suited to their needs as farmers. Settlers met in Mankato on June 2, 1855, to protest their arrival.⁵ At Blue Earth many Ho-Chunk families farmed and built houses and schools, and in 1859 their agent reported farming, schooling, and health at their best since the move.⁵

The same year, needing money, Ho-Chunk leaders agreed by treaty to give up the western part of the reservation. Settlers welcomed the cession but kept calling for full removal, and they began moving onto the ceded land before the treaty was ratified or the Ho-Chunk were paid.⁵ Hughes, no friend of the Ho-Chunk, still recorded that most of the cloth and blankets the government sent for their annuities never reached them, and that the undelivered goods were worth about $10,000.²

The Ho-Chunk did not join the 1862 war. Thirteen men were tried afterward on suspicion of aiding the Dakota, and no one was convicted.⁵ Folwell notes that a military court discharged the Ho-Chunk leader Little Priest and eleven others.⁴ For the settlers around Mankato, that made little difference. MNopedia’s summary is that the public “did not distinguish between Native Americans groups” and demanded removal of the Ho-Chunk as well as the Dakota.⁵

What the record shows about the Knights

The society’s existence is not in doubt, but its documentation is thin. Historian Libby Tronnes, reviewing a recent book-length study of the society, notes that “little documentation exists” for the Knights.¹ That study, Cathy Coats’s To Banish Forever (2024), grew from her 2017 master’s thesis at St. Cloud State University⁷⁸ and reprints the key surviving texts as appendices.⁹

The most important is the ritual itself, a four-page pamphlet of initiation rites and oath.⁷ It survived because someone placed it in the cornerstone box of Old Main at the Mankato normal school, laid on June 22, 1869.¹⁰ The box was reopened in 1923, after a fire destroyed the building, and again in 1968, and its contents went to the university archives,¹⁰ where they were listed online in 2004; no other copy of the ritual is known.⁷ The archive catalogs it as “Ritual/Initiation, Grand Lodge of the Knights of the Forest, ca. 1869.”¹⁰ Coats has said that finding it there was a turning point in her research, and that reading how the text generalized about the Ho-Chunk clarified what was happening in Mankato.⁸

Names come mostly from later accounts and family and civic records. Tronnes lists John F. Meager, Asa Barney, Charles A. Chapman, and John J. Porter Jr. as sworn members, and notes that Coats goes further, inferring other likely members from family ties and membership in public fraternal orders; that part of the roster is her reasoned speculation, not a recovered list.¹ The University of Minnesota Libraries, summarizing her research, describes the members as bankers, politicians, and lawyers, several of whom later sat in the state legislature, and Tronnes reports that her evidence links the society to legislators and to the local Home Guard.⁷¹ Porter’s prominence is visible in Hughes, who records that the camp where the Ho-Chunk were gathered for removal in 1863 was named Camp Porter in his honor, because he “had been most active in their removal.”²

Petitions, Congress, and the removal act

The Knights worked alongside a much louder public campaign. Coats reprints a petition dated January 21, 1863, addressed to the President and the Secretary of the Interior and asking for the removal of the Winnebago.⁹ The state legislature had already sent a memorial to the President seeking their removal.⁴

Congress acted on February 21, 1863, with an act authorizing the President to set apart land “beyond the limits of any State” and to take the steps needed for “the peaceful and quiet removal” of the Winnebago from Minnesota, then to sell their reservation.¹¹ Coats stresses that, unlike earlier Ho-Chunk removals, this one came by statute, with no treaty and no chance for the Ho-Chunk to negotiate.⁷

Did the secret society bring this about? Hughes thought so: he wrote that through its work and “the persistant clamor of the people all over the state,” Congress was induced to pass the removal acts.² Chapman, a member, argued the same in an April 1916 article in the Mankato Daily Review. The Minnesota History Bulletin, summarizing it, reported that the society’s object was “to secure the permanent removal of all Indian tribes from Minnesota” and that Chapman thought it “very probable” that the Winnebago removal “was largely due to the efforts of the society.”¹² Folwell, the more cautious historian, wrote only that “It is supposed that the society exercised some influence on the legislature.”⁴ The documents allow the conclusion that the Knights were one organized part of a statewide demand. They do not show that the society alone decided the outcome.

May 1863: Camp Porter and Crow Creek

On April 25, 1863, the Ho-Chunk were told they would be moved to land on the Missouri River at Crow Creek. Some applied for citizenship to stay and were refused; many others refused to go.⁵ Hughes records that the head chief, Baptiste Lassallieur, said he had seen the new country and found it cold, barren, and unfit to live on, and that the elder chief Winneshiek, a persistent opponent of the 1859 treaty, withdrew to Lake Elysian with two or three hundred followers and defied the authorities.² His band was the last to submit.⁵

In early May, under threat of military force, 1,945 Ho-Chunk were brought to Camp Porter on the riverbank at Mankato.⁵ Steamboats carried them away between May 9 and May 17, and the last group left by wagon for St. Peter to board there. In Mankato, Hughes wrote, “cannons were fired and flags raised.”² Many of the exiled Dakota were sent to the same desolate place, and Folwell describes Dakota and Ho-Chunk reservations at Crow Creek separated “by an air line only,” with food of poor quality and insufficient quantity, an arrival too late and too dry for good crops, and hunger through the first winter.⁴

MNopedia counts more than 550 Ho-Chunk deaths during the removal to South Dakota.⁵ Most survivors left Crow Creek for land beside the Omaha in Nebraska, where the government formally created a reservation for them in November 1865. Their descendants are the Winnebago Tribe of Nebraska; others, whose families returned to Wisconsin or never left, belong to the Ho-Chunk Nation of Wisconsin.⁵ Exiled Dakota families began returning to Minnesota in the 1880s and rebuilt communities at Prairie Island, Shakopee, and the sites of the old agencies.³

Boasts, silence, and how much to believe

The Knights did not stay entirely secret. In 1886 the Mankato Review printed an anonymous “secret history” of the society, which Coats believes was probably written by Chapman.¹ It quoted the oath at length and claimed that some members had a special duty “to lie in ambush on the outskirts of the Winnebago Reservation and shoot any Indian who might be observed outside the lines.”¹ Chapman’s signed 1916 article and Hughes’s county history repeated the claim that the society had been decisive.¹¹²

These are the accounts of men taking credit, written decades later, and they should be read that way. In interviews about her book, Coats has described members waiting around the reservation to shoot anyone who left it, as a scare tactic.⁸⁷ Yet Tronnes reports that Coats also reminds readers there is “no direct evidence of physical violence by the Knights against the Blue Earth Ho-Chunk.”¹ The ambush story may describe real intimidation along the reservation line, or it may be a later embellishment; the surviving sources cannot settle it.

Coats’s larger argument does not depend on proving any single shooting. She treats the removal as ethnic cleansing and the Knights as a hate group whose campaign, she has said, cost hundreds of lives.⁷ In the passage Tronnes quotes, she argues that without the relatively quick exile of the Ho-Chunk, the Knights “could have enacted the same gradual, deliberate, genocidal ethnic cleansing that happened in Texas.”¹ Readers can weigh that comparison; what is documented is that a sworn society of prominent men organized to expel every Native person from the region, that the Ho-Chunk, who had not fought, were expelled within months, and that hundreds died as a result.

Ho-Chunk scholars have pressed for that history to be remembered as theirs, not only as an episode in settler politics. Amy Lonetree, a historian and member of the Ho-Chunk Nation, has said that “there are many Trails of Tears,” and that her nation was removed again and again, with great suffering and death.⁷ Mankato residents have in recent years publicly remembered the thirty-eight Dakota men and boys hanged there.¹ Tronnes urges the same attention to the Ho-Chunk who lived in Blue Earth County, “whose descendants still call Minnesota home.”¹

Footnotes

1. Tronnes 2025, AICRJ 48(1): 238-239. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰ ↩¹¹ ↩¹² ↩¹³

2. Hughes, History of Blue Earth County, 138-140. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷

3. DeCarlo, MNopedia, “US-Dakota War of 1862.” ↩ ↩² ↩³

4. Folwell 1924, vol. 2, 145-146, 255-261 and notes, 439. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹

5. Reicher, MNopedia, “Ho-Chunk and Blue Earth, 1855-1863.” ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰ ↩¹¹

6. 12 Stat. 819, ch. 119, sec. 1. ↩

7. Carpenter, UMN Libraries News, March 29, 2024. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸

8. Berg, Native News Online, January 11, 2024. ↩ ↩² ↩³

9. Coats 2024, table of contents and appendices B-D (Project MUSE). ↩ ↩²

10. MSU Mankato University Archives, Collection 022, box 01, folder 42. ↩ ↩² ↩³

11. 12 Stat. 658, ch. 53, sec. 1. ↩

12. Minnesota History Bulletin 1, no. 6 (May 1916): 347-348. ↩ ↩²